Google adds site previews to Instant Search

Google is adding a new feature to its Instant Search called "Instant Previews …

Love 'em or hate 'em, Google's new "instant" search results are here to stay. The company recently announced that Google Instant was coming to mobile devices, and now, Google is expanding upon that functionality with the introduction of Instant Previews: a way to visually scan through your dynamically-generated search results before choosing which link to click. The feature is (as usual) slowly rolling out to Google users over the next "few days," according to the company, and will be available in 40 languages.

The Instant Previews aren't shown by default, but a magnifying glass next to your search results will indicate that it's there for you to see. When you click on the glass (or the text of the snippet under the page link, for that matter), a snapshot of the site in question will appear to the right of your results—you can see previews for other links by hovering over them once you've clicked on the magnifying glass the first time. Not only that, but Google will highlight the part on the preview where your relevant text is so that you know where to find it on the page (see image above).

We asked Google's Tech Lead for Web Search Features Jeremy Silber why the company chose to invoke the preview only when the user clicked on something, and not by default. "We don't want to mess with a good thing—text snippets are really good for most things, and are certainly fast," he said. "Plus there will always be some people who don't like a new feature, so we don't want people to feel forced into it."

Google hopes that the new preview feature will allow users to add more context before making a decision by letting them quickly compare results and see relevant content on those pages. This can be particularly helpful if you're looking for a page you've seen before—if you have a general idea of what it looks like and what topic you were searching for, Instant Preview can help you find that again without having to click on a bunch of extra links.

The same applies if you're trying to find a specific person in a list of links—Google's example is Google Product Manager Raj Krishnan, who isn't the first hit for his name on Google, but easily differentiated once you see previews of the pages:

"People using this tool are about 5 percent more likely to be satisfied with their results," Silber said. That five percent may not seem like a lot, but Google is all about trying to save its users little bits and pieces of time as of late—not to mention that it keeps people on its own site more, interacting with more things before moving onto somewhere else.